Fatal Refuge: a Mystery/Thriller (The Arizona Thriller Trilogy Book 2)

by Sharon Sterling

  At today’s appointment time Allie left her desk and looked down the hall to watch Sara approach, escorted by the psych tech. Sara wore the unit’s uniform for men and women – cotton scrubs in an orange color which cast a muddy hue on her wrinkled face. Her shuffling gate was demanded by the over-sized rubber flip-flops she wore, all adding to an impression of age and fragility.

  It struck Allie that Sara bore no resemblance at all to her daughter. She was short and wiry in stature while Cindy had been average in height and full-bodied. Sara’s short, salt and pepper hair indicated she was not the one who had endowed her daughter with that head of glorious red hair.

  Allie stepped forward to greet her but before she could speak Sara demanded, “Who are you, and why do you want to talk to me?”

  “My name is Allie and I’m a counselor. Doctor Sirota asked me to talk to you about losing your daughter – so much sadness. Please, come and sit down for a minute.”

  Sara entered the office slowly then sat down in the chair near the door, rigidly upright and unsmiling. “I didn’t lose her, she ran away with a Marine.”

  So, no time for the pleasantries, Allie told herself. “Uh, yes, I understand. You hadn’t been in touch with her for years, had you?”

  “Just because I couldn’t find her.”

  “And what did you learn about her recently?”

  Sara looked down at her feet. Finally she looked up, her face blank, her voice emotionless. “She’s gone. Three times she’s gone.”

  “Three times? How can that be?”

  “Gone when she left me, just a teenager. Gone when God’s voice told me she was gone, there in the Kofa. Told me it was a sacrifice I had to accept so I could concentrate on saving this place from Armageddon. And gone the final time when the newspaper lady showed me her picture.”

  “Did the newspaper lady tell you why she’s gone?”

  “You mean that someone murdered her? Yes, that’s the lady’s job, the news. Now I’d like to go back and finish my poem.” She shifted in her chair, but Allie didn’t budge from hers. Her intuition had told her counseling Sara would not be easy. Establishing rapport would be challenging but if things went well she might eventually be able to understand the origin of Sara’s desire to prevent an imagined global conflagration. She asked, “You’re writing the poems to try to prevent a war?”

  “Isn’t that worth doing? You got any ideas for saving people?”

  Allie refused to be disarmed. She said, “Sara you look like you might be cold. Would you like me to ask for a blanket to wrap around you?”

  “No. No thank you.”

  Allie leaned back in her office chair and crossed her legs in a gesture of ease she didn’t feel. “So you get ideas to save people. Where do you get those ideas?”

  “Different ways, different times, different people.”

  “Oh, do I know any of the people you’re talking about?”

  “Could be.”

  “Let’s find out. What are their names?”

  “My conscience speaks to me. She doesn’t have a name.”

  Allie smiled. “I guess not. Mine doesn’t either. But if everyone heard the voice of their conscience and paid attention, we’d all be better off, wouldn’t we?”

  “Sure enough.”

  “Do you hear other voices, Sara? Do you hear voices telling you to do things, or saying bad things to you?”

  “The only bad one is Borbour. I call him Borbour for short.”

  “Oh, Barber. What kinds of things does Barber say to you?”

  “That I ate too much or ate the wrong things. Oranges and tomatoes, that acidy stuff sets my stomach to growlin’ something awful. He’s a nag with a grudge, that Borbour.”

  Allie stopped with the next question on the tip of her tongue and stared at her client. The word borbourigmy, a medical term for a noisy gut, came in a flash, along with the knowledge that this woman was playing with her. Sara was not willing to reveal herself. She didn’t trust Allie yet. Allie tried again. “Sara, have you ever heard different voices that other people can’t hear?”

  “You mean like auditory hallucinations? Naw. That’s for crazy people, and I’m not crazy. I might be the only sane person on this poor, doomed planet.”

  “Is the planet doomed? It would help if you’d tell me more.”

  “Wars and hatred is why it’s doomed. People cutting people’s heads off and those heathen countries getting nuclear bombs. I stopped reading the papers years ago, but I still hear about it, like it or not.”

  “There is a lot of bad news in the papers. But I think the idea of a doomed world might have come to you before. When was the first time you had those thoughts?”

  Sara’s eyebrows lifted, as if she was startled by the question. She remained silent for a very long time. Allie waited, hoping she hadn’t triggered an abreaction, a memory of trauma like a flashback, that could catapult her client back into psychosis. Finally Sara began to speak and Allie knew the question had by-passed Sara’s defenses and summoned a memory.

  “When I was seven years old, my best friend Betsy died. I knew what that meant, from our dog that died. I asked if Betsy fell down a well or if a mountain lion got her, or a rattler. They told me no, it was a germ. I didn’t understand germs. I asked my teacher. She told me germs are little beasts so tiny we can’t see them, and they’re everywhere. She said they kill a lot of people, even babies and kids, without people knowing they’re even there.”

  “That must have been a very frightening thing for a seven year old to hear.”

  Sara gave her a faint smile. Allie waited without speaking. Finally Sara said, “You’re too old to be one of the nine hundred.”

  “Nine hundred?”

  Sara began to rock back and forth in her chair, her flip-flops scraping the floor. She recited in a sing-song voice,

  “Youth sees a peace-maker as an enterprising fox

  but to old destroyers, peace is so unorthodox.

  With a satisfied smile that said she had just had the last word, Sara stood, opened the office door, walked down the corridor and stopped at the locked steel door to the ward. She glanced back at Allie, who had followed close on her heels. Allie keyed open the heavy door and summoned the psych tech inside with a wave of her arm. Sara walked back into the ward.

  Allie returned to her office shaking her head. She was fascinated by her glimpse into what might be the origin of Sara’s paranoia and was eager to learn more. Nevertheless, the woman’s name calling had gotten to her. She knew not to take these things personally but when she sat at her desk she bent her head and rested her face in her cupped palms. I’m barely pushing fifty, yet I get tagged “the old bitch” and an “old destroyer.”

  • • •

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Allie knew that during Sara's three weeks at the Mental Health Clinic inpatient unit, Sara was also seen and assessed by a second psychiatrist, who agreed with Dr. Sirota that her diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia and she was gravely disabled. That diagnosis and that designation meant Sara would be classified as seriously mentally ill.

  The process of court-ordering her to submit to both in-patient and out-patient treatment followed. The hearing took place in the Center’s large conference room. A judge experienced in mental health law presided. Sara was present with her attorney, appointed for her because she was indigent. There to testify that she must be court-ordered for treatment were the two psychiatrist, two psychiatric nurses and one of the psych-techs.

  Allie had been asked to testify, but she refused. She wanted to keep the marginal amount of trust that Sara had been able to place in her. She knew the hearing was a formality; no one would testify that Sara was not disabled by a mental illness. When they released Sara from the Unit, Allie could continue to see her on an outpatient basis once a month and Sara would report to the Clinic monthly, where Dr. Sirota would inject her with anti-psychotic medication in an extended release form called a decanoate, which lasted thirty days.

>   Allie’s next meetings with Sara went well. She again talked about her childhood. The death of her friend at age seven had truly been a pivotal event. It filled her young mind with vague but pervasive fear, a malignancy waiting to metastasize into paranoia. Trauma triggered its dissemination into schizophrenia.

  By the time she reached age twelve, Sara’s reaction to the awareness of invisible organisms that kill was the desire to fight them, to become a bacteriologist or even a doctor. But she was one in a family of seven children born to uneducated and hard-working farmers on five acres of land in Oklahoma, where hard work and stoic acceptance of hardship were the prime virtues. She and her family lived much as the early pioneers had. When Sara’s younger brother broke his arm, her father set it, splinted it with sticks and it healed. When Sara came down with measles one summer, she kept on working in the fields, feverish and red with rash every scorching day for a week. Her eyesight suffered in consequence.

  It wasn’t surprising to Allie when Sara spoke about her parents’ belief that cities were proverbial “dins of iniquity” and education was an indoctrination that contradicted God’s laws. They refused to send her to school after the eighth grade.

  Allie needed to talk with someone more knowledgeable about Sara and her prognosis. She stopped by Dr. Sirota’s office a week before Sara’s release date. The room appeared comfortably furnished and comfortably cluttered with stacks of books, papers and professional magazines. The psychiatrist’s tie hung over the back of one of the chairs and his desk held two empty coffee mugs. He had just hung up the phone when he saw her in the doorway.

  “Come in, come in, Allie,” he said, sitting back in his chair, a warm smile implying he welcomed the interruption. “What are you up to today?”

  Allie sat in the chair across from him. “Doctor Sirota…”

  “Call me David. We’ll both be more comfortable.”

  “Oh, okay. Well, I just want to talk about Sara Cameron a bit. I think I may have stumbled on one of the factors that contributed to her psychosis. The trouble is, having the key to paranoia doesn’t seem to unlock it.”

  “You’re exactly right. Welcome to the world of hospital mental health, or behavioral health as we now like to call it. We don’t treat the kind of ills that knowing the cause of produces the cure.”

  “But – David – she is so intelligent. It seems she should be able to see the flaws in her thinking.”

  “We haven’t given her an IQ test but people with paranoid schizophrenia are often highly intelligent and certainly capable of higher levels of education.”

  “When they’re psychotic it’s hard to see that,” Allie said.

  “I know. Schizophrenia is a strange disease. When it’s in remission, many people behave as normally as you and I. When it surfaces, it produces some of the most bizarre and disturbing behaviors of any mental illness.”

  Allie nodded. “I’ve seen some of that first hand. Not pretty. I heard that psychiatrists used to think it was the result of bad parenting – bad mothering, actually.”

  “Bad mothering or bad parenting in general probably contributes to any psychiatric diagnosis. But schizophrenia occurs at about the same percentage rate in every population in the world, so we know it’s a product of nature, not nurture. It has a biological basis. It’s in people’s genes.”

  “Then why is it still such a mystery?”

  “The brain is complicated, in case you haven’t noticed.” He smiled at her again, and stretched with his arms over his head. He leaned further back in his chair before he continued, “Studies of identical twins show that although they’re both equally predisposed to the illness biologically, one will manifest it and the other won’t.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Life happens. Traumas of various kinds can bring it on. From what you’ve already told me, I’d say being denied the education she thought was so important was Sara’s trauma. If she had become a professional whose job was to combat diseases, that might have relieved her fear and given her a focus for her intellect. She might have become a successful doctor or researcher with no trace of mental illness.”

  “Or she might have been a poetess.”

  Dr. Sirota smiled and put his hands on the arms of his chair as he leaned back a bit more. Allie thought his smile was now indulgent.

  “Well, listen to this one,” she said. She pulled a scrap of paper from the folder in her hand. “After we talked about how hot it’s getting she recited it to me. I liked it so much I wrote it down. It’s about seasons having moods.

  ‘Winter is cool esprit. Spring seems, to me

  Impetuous glee. Summer’s tranquility.

  Autumn, obviously is Nature eager to acquaint

  the world with all her stirring moods of paint.’ ”

  “Just keep her talking, Allie, and writing poetry if that’s what she wants to do.”

  In their twice-weekly sessions, Sara’s personality emerged more as her thinking became more logical and organized. Allie knew she was coming to like Sara and she struggled to stay professional. She believed that Sara came to like her, too. The woman always gifted her with a few lines of verse in farewell when she left the office.

  Their last meeting in her office also signaled a beginning. Allie asked Sara how she adjusting to being on an antipsychotic medication.

  “It has its good points and its bad points. I feel just a little more connected with people and with things around me, you know?”

  Allie nodded.

  “But I also feel slower, somehow, like things are more of an effort. Even my mind feels slower at times, like someone poured syrup on my brain. My poetry doesn’t come to me quick and clear like it used to. And I’m gaining weight. My appetite has never been this strong.”

  Allie told her, “I know this is a hard adjustment for you, Sara. But now you have a place to live and a chance at a more normal life, a more comfortable lifestyle.”

  “I was comfortable before and I don’t give a hoot about any kind of style.”

  Allie had no answer for that. Finally Sara said, “I know what you’re talking about. Normal people don’t sneak onto military bases or get arrested.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Sara, I …”

  “It’s okay. I can still write poetry, even if it is harder. As long as I just hand the pages to folks instead of pasting them up everywhere, I can still get the word out.”

  Allie nodded “yes.” She had not succeeded in shaking Sara’s core delusion, that it was her responsibility to save the world from destruction. And who was she, anyway, to deprive a woman of such a cherished goal? Still, she wanted to mitigate Sara’s fear, if just a little.

  She moved her chair a bit closer to her client’s. “Sara, last night I was reading a biography of H.G. Wells. Do you know his name?”

  “Oh, the War of the Worlds guy. Why?”

  “Here is some of his advice.” She reached back for a note pad on her desk and read from it. “He said, ‘While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as if he were sure of it.’ ”

  Sara shook her head. “But a reasonable woman can still have her doubts.”

  Allie had to let it go. “Since this is our last session, do you have any questions for me, anything I can do for you?”

  “There is one thing.”

  Allie felt pleased and wary at the same time. “What is that?”

  “You said the County buried my Ruth when no one claimed her body.”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s true. In the cemetery in Somerton.”

  “But I know her spirit isn’t there. I want to go where my daughter saw the last light of day. I want to put a cross where she died, and flowers. She might have been misguided, but she was a good girl, my Ruth.”

  “Yes. I knew her, Sara. We were friends.”

  Sara sat bolt upright. “Friends? You were friends with her? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t think it was imp
ortant for you to know. You had enough to deal with, coming to terms with your diagnosis and being court-ordered for treatment. The fact that I knew Cindy – Ruth – made me want to help you more.”

  “You have.” Now there was reserve in Sara’s face and voice.

  “Sara, I know they found her body in the Kofa, but I don’t know where. It’s a big place but I do know someone who knows and she might be willing to take you there.”

  “Will you come?”

  “I don’t know if I should. I don’t normally … well, I’ll ask my supervisor. But some of the birdwatchers she hung out with might want to go with you. They loved her, too.”

  • • •

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Lon threw the three-page inventory of Sara’s belongings on his desk and leaned back in his chair. His phone was on speaker. “I need to go through them, Reed, before you give them back to her. There could be something there that just might be important.”

  Reed’s sarcasm came through clearly. “What, a Shakespeare sonnet? Get real, Raney.”

  “And I want to interview her. You said they released her from the psych unit?”

  “Yeah. They put her up in that little bungalow complex on Avenue C, with the rest of the seriously weird. I imagine she’ll agree to meet with you. A month ago, all you’d hear from her is vapor-speak but they tell me she actually makes sense now. And when the Assistant County Attorney dropped all the charges she made it clear to the little lady that she has to be on good behavior.”

  “Yeah. More when I get there.”

  The Yuma Police Department’s evidence room reminded Lon of his grandmother’s basement: dark and stuffy, an aura laden with possibilities where a breath-smothering, uncounted number of objects leaked emotion and murmured previously untold stories.

  He shook off the desire to browse and pulled twelve boxes marked “Cameron” off the shelves, sneezing only twice in the process. He found a folding chair and sat in one of the wider aisles, surrounded by cardboard cartons marked with her name and date of arrest. He quickly examined and then pushed away four heavy boxes filled with books and went through the others. He shook his head at plastic evidence bags filled with pencils and pencil shavings, hair clips, underwear, lawn ornaments, an old toaster, half-burned candles, and framed pictures with religious themes. Soon, he ceased to be surprised at anything he found. He placed each item on the floor and when he reached the bottom of the box he put all of them back.